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“Had the sale to the buyer not taken place, the assignee would have been left with inadequate capital to fund the significant costs to preserve and market OnLive’s patents and other intellectual property, thus greatly reducing expected recoveries essentially to those of a forced piecemeal auction,” wrote Joel Weinberg, president of Insolvency Services Group (ISG) the firm handling the bankruptcy-like proceedings in a letter to Mercury News.

Not only have former employees lost all stock options in the company, it’s unlikely many – if any – of the firm’s early backers will see any return on their investment.

Investors such as UK broadband provider BT, Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC, and US firms Time Warner and AT&T have been told they will see a return only if there is money left over after debts have been covered.

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If only Microsoft had bought them, then I could play games on my computer connected to my laptop connected to my tablet, which is connected to my stove, which is connected to my phone, all whilst in my refrigerator.

Yup, this is a bummer. As a proud owner of the micro console they definitely had some promise. Though after the dust settled, there were some awful stories about steve pearlman and how it delt with other companies like EA/Activision, its no wonder they never took off.

Hopefully with new owners they will get some stuff together, but in the meanwhile things are not looking too bad for Sony’s Gaikai

Yes, I can see the Sony/Gaikai thing really working out quite well for both parties, though it will be interesting to see how it works in Japan and Asia compared to here given the typically higher internet speeds there.

This is kinda depressing, not that I think cloud gaming can really work yet, but because all the investors lost everything, the employees were destroyed and the value of the company is nothing to what it should be.

Sorry to hear that. I was really liking the service, but then I got a PC that could handle modern games and since then I haven’t really been using OnLive. I still think cloud gaming is coming and will become a major factor in gaming, it just may not be ready for primetime yet. We’ll see. Maybe this company will somehow manage to turn OnLive around, who knows?

To me, OnLive was always an amazing idea that was about five to ten years ahead of its time. As I posted in the Sony article, internet speeds (at least in the US) just aren’t where they need to be for streamed gaming to be practical. Until that changes, gamers are better off buying the game on disk or downloading it via Steam (or another service).

Once that does change, a company like OnLive could really take off. Sadly, they were just a little too far ahead of the curve to reap the benefits.